God and Mrs Thatcher (12 page)

In the inter-war years, tentative steps had been made in the ecumenical movement but it was embraced with renewed vigour amidst the spirit of reconciliation after the war. Relations between Protestant denominations were solidified through the establishment of the British Council of Churches (BCC), while the cause also found an international vehicle through the World Council of Churches (WCC), which owed much to Anglican input and was conceived as a kind of Christian UN. Roman Catholicism was not represented on either of these bodies. The Catholic Church was busy forging its own course
in this period, establishing schools and churches to accommodate the post-war wave of Irish immigration; it would be a further twenty years before the Catholic Church would gain full recognition on the national and ecumenical stage. The movement towards Christian unity as well as the break-up of traditional partisan-church allegiances strengthened rather than weakened the position of the Church of England, allowing it to enjoy, in the words of one ecclesiastical historian, ‘a spiritual superiority over all other churches, and a confident sense of its growing political, social and even intellectual claim to a place in the mainstream of national life’.
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It was precisely at this time that Margaret Thatcher moved away from Methodism and became an Anglican, albeit of a ‘low church’ variety. It is hardly unknown for those who have risen socially to also rise spiritually. Margaret Thatcher, however, justified it differently, stating in an interview with the
Catholic Herald
in 1978 that she had longed for a ‘little bit more formality’ in religion and given that John Wesley had always regarded himself as a member of the Church of England, she did not feel that a great theological divide had been crossed.
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Technically, this is true, although one wonders whether her parents agreed. Much more likely was that the strict and sober Nonconformity into which she had been raised did not complement the new world Thatcher was now operating in. Political expediency may have played a part in her decision too: in the 1950s, Conservatives were still expected to be Anglicans. Margaret Thatcher also took the conscious decision not to enforce any form of worship on her children. ‘I did not insist that they went to church. I think that was probably because I’d had so much insistence myself,’ she later admitted.
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Her decision provoked consternation from her mother, who reprimanded her daughter for not raising the twins in the Methodist faith. If ever there was a sign that Thatcher had escaped her childhood by this point, it was in her attitude towards her own children’s religious education.

It would take Margaret Thatcher just under a decade to get into
Parliament but finally, in 1959, she entered through the doors of Westminster as the MP for Finchley. At a dinner for the new intake, Harold Macmillan recommended Disraeli’s 1845 novel
Sybil, Or the two Nations,
on the plight of the working class, as preparatory reading for his cohort of MPs. Thatcher later admitted that she did not take his advice. When Prime Minister, Thatcher tended to caricature the Macmillan era as one of complacency and misdirection. If this is what she felt at the time, she never voiced it. All evidence points to the fact that she fully subscribed to Macmillan’s paternalistic vision of Toryism. During the election of 1964, in a speech entitled ‘What it means to be a Christian Member of Parliament’, for example, Thatcher offered a classic Tory-Anglican defence of the Established Church and, in a sentiment worthy of William Temple, affirmed that freedom and democracy could not be sustained on ‘an empty stomach’ and that Britain as a ‘Christian nation’ provided this political nourishment through its welfare state.
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Macmillan certainly considered her in his camp; appointing her as a junior minister of Pensions and National Insurance in 1960; a post she held until the fall of the Conservative government in 1964.

One-nation Tories may have been leading the government during the long period of Conservative power between 1951 and 1964, but those of a classical liberal persuasion proved a constant source of agitation. Tensions came to a head in 1958 when the entire Treasury team – Enoch Powell, Nigel Birch and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft – resigned in protest to Macmillan’s refusal to rein in public spending. The Prime Minister may have shrugged it off as ‘a little local difficulty’ but the fact was that most of the Tory grassroots were in sympathy. Under Macmillan, Conservative Party conferences were often frustrating encounters, not helped by the fact that party activists were treated with a large degree of contempt by the leadership. Macmillan’s Treasury team had resigned over technicalities of economic policy, however the concerns of the libertarians at the
grassroots encompassed broader ideological concerns about the demise of civil society and state encroachment on the individual. Macmillan’s ‘little local difficulty’ in 1958 was a sign of much bigger things to come.

THE 1950S WERE
not as harmonious as some people like to claim nor were the 1960s as radical as some people like to remember. The term ‘the sixties’ has become convenient shorthand to describe the arrival of affluence, the end of deference, the relaxation of social mores and the intensification of sexual and identity politics that occurred in Britain between 1963 and 1973. But, if Britain was swinging, it was not to a particularly vigorous rhythm, it seems. There were more bingo players than Buddhists;
The Sound of Music
outperformed
Last Tango in Paris
at the box office; subscribers to
Reader’s Digest
outnumbered those of underground satirical magazine
Oz
; and far more people visited National Trust properties than marched on anti-nuclear demonstrations with CND.
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Britain did experience a culture war of sorts but it was not as divisive or as deep-rooted as that in the US. Three institutions, however, did undergo profound transformation: the BBC, the universities and the Church of England. Once the fabric of the conservative establishment, they morphed into paragons of the new liberal values and would later become key targets for the New Right.

If the post-war settlement of the 1940s had reformulated the relationship between the state and the public citizen, then the liberalising legislation of the 1960s undoubtedly signalled a new consensus between the private individual and the law. Stitch by stitch, Britain undid the restrictive legal corset that had been in existence for 100 years or more and ushered in a flurry of reforming legislation, which some heralded as civilising measures while others denounced it as encouraging permissiveness. The Macmillan government set the bandwagon
in motion, allowing for the less contentious issues of obscenity, gambling and drinking to proceed through the House, while it would be Labour’s Home Secretary Roy Jenkins who would later steer through the trickier issues of decriminalising homosexuality and abortion, the ending of capital punishment and the easing of restrictions on divorce. Most of the existing laws had been ripe for reform for a long time, but it was caution and compromise rather than radicalism that characterised their eventual passing. Nor could these laws be solely attributed to the spirit of the age: most had their origins in the inter-war period and much of the thinking had been done in the early 1950s. Puritans and progressives could be found on both sides of the House while the Labour leadership remained conscious of how these developments (particularly the decriminalisation of homosexuality) would go down with their working-class supporters. These Acts only applied to England and Wales; Scotland and Northern Ireland, largely due to religious pressures, would pursue a much more restrictive path and at a much slower pace.

Far from being instigated by a band of secular liberals, it was the Church of England, whom Parliament still entrusted to act as its conscience, which played an instrumental role in orchestrating and legitimising reform. Some Anglicans took a pragmatic view, considering that Victorian notions of ‘sin’, to which many citizens did not subscribe, should no longer be enshrined in law. Others took a more positive view, forwarding the Christian case for the New Morality.
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The conservative Archbishop Fisher was clearly reluctant to lead the Church down this path, but his successor, the pious yet practical Anglo-Catholic Michael Ramsey, who arrived at Canterbury in 1961, was prepared to concede that reform was inevitable and that the Church should not close its eyes. That these changes were even being considered was itself evidence of a new tone within the Church, from a culture of condemnation to one of understanding: ‘Better to deal with how people are than how we would like them to be’ was the guiding principle.

The existing obscenity law dated back to 1857 and was revised just over a century later in 1959 while theatrical censorship was also taken out of the regulatory hands of the Lord Chancellor. The
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
case in 1960 became an infamous show-trial for the recently passed Obscene Publications Act as daily reports from the courtroom titillated the chattering classes, particularly the contribution of John Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich, who threw his priestly weight behind D. H. Lawrence’s book. Robinson was a man who delighted in rumbling the ecclesiastical establishment and on this occasion he did not disappoint. He declared that sex was sacred and seemed to imply that Lady Chatterley’s affair with the gamekeeper Mellors was a symbolic act of Holy Communion. An incandescent Archbishop Fisher immediately ushered out a public rebuke: adultery was, and remained, a sin.

The Betting and Gaming Act of 1960 had a much more profound impact on ordinary people’s lives. Illegal betting was a thing of the past as gambling establishments soon popped up on the high street; 10,000 within the first six months of the Act. Gambling acquired a respectability hitherto unseen and signalled another nail in the coffin for Britain’s Nonconformist past. One issue which had been preying on the minds of parliamentarians since the mid-nineteenth century was the death penalty. Even though opinion polls consistently pointed to the public’s overwhelming support for its retention, parliamentarians decided that they knew best and voted for a temporary abolition in 1965, which was made permanent in 1969. Church leaders were resolutely in favour, with Archbishop Ramsey making an impassioned speech in the Lords supporting the bill. There were some law ’n’ order populists, including Margaret Thatcher, who cried ‘an eye for eye’, but most were of the view that the removal of the death penalty was a positive Christian step.

The decision to finally decriminalise homosexuality in 1967 was the surest sign that Parliament was prepared to disconnect British law
from Christian notions of sin. The initiative had in fact come from the Church, which had published a report in 1954 advocating decriminalisation. This was the prompt that the Macmillan government needed to appoint its own commission, led by committed Anglican Lord Wolfenden, whose proposals were announced in 1957 and broadly echoed the Church’s position. Archbishop Ramsey backed the new law and faced the inevitable backlash from the Church and especially in the Lords, where he was accused of debasing the nation’s morals and promoting homosexuality. The Methodist Conference and the Roman Catholic Church’s Advisory Committee endorsed the change but the Church of Scotland refused. It would later prove to be the main obstacle to the decriminalisation of homosexuality north of the border, which would only get the green light in 1980. Some prominent Anglicans, including the Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, were involved in the Homosexual Law Reform Society, which fought the decade-long campaign to get Wolfenden translated into law. Few Christians, however, were prepared to go as far as the Quakers, who maintained that homosexuals should be treated equally (they compared it to being left-handed) and advocated full recognition. The Sexual Offences Act was an inherently conservative measure, which meant that the sexual act itself was no longer a crime. The 1967 Act ensured that the battle for private rights had been won; it would not be until the late 1980s that the homosexual lobby would effectively mobilise and seek full equality before the law.

Two years later, in 1969, the Divorce Reform Act was passed, but it had had a fraught history. When the first relaxation of the divorce laws had come in 1937, Archbishop Lang had abstained. Despite being privately opposed, Lang was of the view that as Britain was no longer a Christian country, it was wrong to enforce Christian standards in the law. His successors, however, did not share his view and quashed successive attempts at reform in 1951 and 1963 (of the latter, Ramsey’s intervention in the Lords had been crucial in defeating the bill).
Conscious that change was inevitable, Ramsey commissioned a Church report to ensure some influence over Parliament. It proved problematic: how could the Church realistically admit that breakdown could occur without undermining marriage as a principle?
Putting Asunder,
published in 1966, however, concluded that an offence did not need to be committed for divorce to take place; in effect, it was a concession that marriage could divert from the Christian ideal. The Law Commission took much the same line and together they thrashed out a set of proposals, which accepted ‘irretrievable breakdown’ as a justification for separation. Ramsey, though, was displeased with the result and, when the vote finally came, he abstained. The Matrimonial Property Act, passed a year later, was equally significant, for it enabled women for the first time to claim on their former husband’s earnings, thus making divorce a more viable proposition for the female spouse.

No issue more clearly demonstrates the tameness of moral reform in this decade than the debate over abortion. In the US, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling on
Roe vs Wade
became a defining moment that would subsequently divide states, parties and voters. Britain’s Abortion Act in 1967, in contrast, generated much discussion, yet passed with far less controversy. Some promoted a women’s right to choose (an argument reinforced by the recent introduction of the contraceptive pill), but most were of the opinion that in a country with a national health service, it was an immoral anomaly that women were forced into seeking illegitimate and archaic procedures which often led to scarring, permanent damage and even death. Introduced by the son of a Church of Scotland minister, Liberal MP David Steel, the bill did not directly sanction abortions, but provided a legal justification for carrying them out under stringent restrictions. The Church had prompted the debate in 1964 when it published a report under the chairmanship of the Bishop of Durham, Ian Ramsey, which marked a distinction between abortion and infanticide and concluded that the risk of the life of the mother was the only grounds for abortion. The
Church’s intervention, while influential, was in the end limited; the Abortion Act would go much further than the bishops hoped. When it came to the vote the Lords Spiritual were divided with Archbishop Michael Ramsey refusing to endorse it. The Roman Catholics opposed it outright but its bishops were too poorly organised and too late to the negotiating table to effectively offer a voice. Catholics would later provide much of the weight behind pro-life pressure groups LIFE and the Society for the Unborn Child, which would spearhead the calls for tighter controls in the 1980s.